(Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction) One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota is assaulted. The details of the crime are slow to surface, as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband Bazil, but after this one day, her 13-year-old son Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. Though he tries to help his mother, she takes to her bed and slides into an abyss of solitude, and Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared. Bazil, a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a system that defies his efforts, but Joe sets out with his friends Cappy, Zack, and Angus to get some answers of his own, on a quest that takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. This newest novel from the author of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (a National Book Award finalist) and the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves has been compared to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird by Library Journal, the Miami Herald, and other reviewers for the relationship between the young protagonist and his father.

"Joe is an incredibly endearing narrator, full of urgency and radiant candor.... The story he tells transforms a sad, isolated crime into a revelation about how maturity alters our relationship with our parents, delivering us into new kinds of love and pain."—Washington Post